Book Review
Speeches by Paul R. Baier
(published by the Louisiana Bar Foundation, 2014)
Reviewed by R. Patrick Vance
P
rofessor Paul R. Baier is a keen observer of
the law and the jurists and scholars who are
lovingly profiled in his latest publication,
Speeches. His portraits range from the
Olympian U.S. Supreme Court where he served as a
Judicial Fellow in 1975 to a selection of Louisiana’s
distinguished jurists and Civil Code scholars.
24 June / July 2015
Our Paul Baier is not the 6’4” former
American professional ice hockey
defenseman one finds with a Google
search. Rather our Paul Baier is the
young professor who came to Louisiana
in 1972 from Harvard Law School by
way of Michigan and Tennessee where
he first instructed aspiring lawyers.
Prof. Baier credits that legal lion from
Ville Platte, Albert Tate Jr., with the
sweet words of persuasion to join the
Louisiana State University faculty in
Baton Rouge. It was a variation of
“laissez les bon temps rouler” — “you’ll
have fun,” as Judge Tate phrased it —
that closed the deal. And fun he had.
What the close reader will observe in
his Speeches is that Prof. Baier arrived
in Louisiana as a student of the U.S.
Constitution, and, in time, became an
acknowledged scholar of that great
document and a devotee of Louisiana’s
Civil Code heritage. Over the course
of the next 40 years in recognition of
his considerable facility with words
and immense knowledge of judicial
history, Prof. Baier’s inner Cicero was
called upon to add gravitas to an event.
He participated in events of celebration
from the U.S. Supreme Court Historical
Society in Washington, D.C. to the
Louisiana Law Review banquet at
Juban’s Restaurant in Baton Rouge, with
numerous significant retrospectives in
between. While he arrived as a Harvard
man, he morphed into a Professeur de
Faculté de Droit, a Marcus Tullius
Baierus, so to speak.
Although this 264-page volume is
modestly titled Speeches, Orations
seems a more apt appellation for this
collection of grand words and perceptive
observations on the giants in U.S. and
Louisiana jurisprudence, including a
trio of Chief Justices, Edward Douglas
White, Louisiana’s contribution of the
ninth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court, William Rehnquist and Louisiana
Chief Justice John Dixon; Associate
Justices Antonin Scalia, Hugo Black,
Lewis Powell and Harry Blackman; a
trio of Louisiana associate justices, the
beloved Albert Tate, Jr., who also served
on the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals,
Justices John Weimer and Luther Cole;
and a brace of Louisiana judges, one
state and one federal, Judges Melvin
Shortess and Jane Triche Milazzo.
How judges judge is the recurring
theme that runs through Speeches. As an
example, one of Prof. Baier’s sketches
is found in his Retrospective of our
own Chief Justice John Dixon upon the
occasion of his retirement in 1990. The
picture painted of Justice Dixon is not
abstract. It is simple, unadorned and
direct, as straight forward and plain as
Dixon’s adherence to the edict of Strunk
and White’s The Elements of Style —
“omit needless words.” Indeed, Prof.
Baier’s final brushstroke in summing
up Dixon’s march to mete out justice
is to quote the justice himself — “It is
almost a contradiction in terms to speak
of the thought and actions of a human
being as ‘objective.’ A man’s thoughtful
decisions are a product of his whole life
and his whole environment.”
Clearly, Prof. Baier’s “main man”
for his orations, whom he draws upon
time and again, is Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., himself a Harvard man and
a long-serving associate justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court who published his
own Speeches in 1891. We learn from
Prof. Baier’s introduction that Holmes’
Speeches was described at a black-tie
dinner in the LSU Union in 1979 which
he attended as “not quite a Bible, still
a Book of most uncommon prayer.”
The existence of Holmes’ Speeches
was a revelation to Prof. Baier, not
on the road to Damascus, but on his
subsequent journey as both an advocate
for constitutional principles and as a
sought-after commentator on the work
of jurists and scholars.
Yet, Prof. Baier was not blinded
by Holmes’ brilliant light on the law
and human condition — “The life of
the law has not been logic; it has been
experience.” — but he was inspired,
went forth and observed. As Holmes’
disciple, Prof. Baier echoes his muse —
“law is a human enterprise. It is more
interesting, as life is more interesting,
by virtue of its intellectual personalities.
. . .” The thesis of Speeches so stated,
Prof. Baier notes, “These pages are a
scrapbook of a few friends who have
tinctured my landscape. . . .”
Ironically, Prof. Baier’s Speeches
captures moments in his own life as
he celebrated the present by reminding
us of the importance of the wisdom of
the past. In so doing, Prof. Baier, as an
observer extraordinaire, without design,
has found a place in the Pantheon of
those he has observed. Well said, mon
professeur, and to paraphrase the sage
of Ville Platte — c’est si bon.
The book was published by the Louisiana Bar
Foundation (LBF). Prof. Paul R. Baier was the
LBF’s first Scholar-in-Residence. Claitor’s Law
Books in Baton Rouge is marketing the book, with
a 20 percent royalty being paid to the LBF to benefit
the LBF’s Civil Justice Initiative. To order the book,
go to: www.claitors.com.
R. Patrick Vance is a senior
partner and the head of
commercial litigation in
the New Orleans office
of Jones Walker, L.L.P.,
where he has worked
since his graduation in
1975 from Louisiana State
University Paul M. Hebert
Law Center. While in law
school, he took several
classes taught by Prof.
Paul R. Baier. (pvance@
joneswalker.com; Ste. 5100, 201 St. Charles Ave.,
New Orleans, LA 70170)
Louisiana Bar Journal Vol. 63, No. 1
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